Miro Heiskanen was caught for an interview by Finnish media source Iltalehti at his summer Heiskanen camp. He thinks the Dallas Stars have what they need to win a Stanley Cup. He also knows exactly what stopped them last spring. Let’s take a deeper look into Heiskanen’s opinions and also look back on what local Texas media covered before jumping into the start of this season.
The Stars have “all the tools to go all the way with this group,” Heiskanen told Iltalehti’s Aki-Petteri Pulkkinen at his Viima Hockey camp. The problem he keeps circling back to is narrow. What they did at even strength wasn’t good enough, and it ended a first-round series they were built to win. “Five-on-five we have to be able to produce more,” he said, before adding that the defense needs to be tighter. He wants uglier goals, too, the kind that dried up when it counted. The Stars need “more dirty goals,” he said, and did not get many of them last season.
A Diagnosis Dallas Already Made
Nothing Heiskanen said in Finland would have surprised anyone who followed the Stars in April. Glen Gulutzan reached the same conclusion after the Minnesota Wild won the opener 6-1, telling reporters the special teams needed to be better and that the five-on-five play wasn’t good enough. Deeper into the series, the Stars head coach asked for the exact things Heiskanen is now asking for. As Gulutzan put it after Game 4:
“If you look at the games as a whole, we’ve got to find a few more tips. We’ve got to get to the net a little bit harder. We got to come up with some loose pucks there around the net, and when we do get a Grade-A chance, we gotta finish.”
source – ‘How Every 5-on-5 Goal in the Dallas/Minnesota Series Has Been Scored, and What the Stars Can Do Differently’ – Robert Tiffin – Stars Thoughts – 04-26-2026
By the time the season ended, Gulutzan admitted the offense had been a worry all season. He told reporters the Stars scored at the 19th rate in the league during the regular season and 11th of 16 in the playoffs:
“So, we were always in the bottom half of generating offense.”
source – ‘[Almost] Everything We Learned from Dallas Stars End of Year Interviews: System Changes, Jamie Benn’s Decision, Jake Oettinger’s Urgency, Jason Robertson’s High Standards, and Injury Updates Galore’ – Robert Tiffin – Stars Thoughts – 05-04-2026
Heiskanen seems to align with Gulutzan, which is a good sign that a team leader, like Heiskanen, is aligned with the coach.
The Offense Stopped Finishing
Stars correspondent Robert Tiffin argued in his Substack coverage last season that Dallas generated enough at even strength in the playoffs and simply couldn’t finish.
“The Stars are not a bad 5v5 offensive team this playoff run. They have, rather, been an abysmal finishing team at 5v5.”
source – ‘The Morning After a Demoralizing Loss’ – Robert Tiffin – Stars Thoughts – 04-29-2026
The volume problem was real too, and it predated the series. At five-on-five during the regular season, the Stars finished last in the league in both shot attempts and shots on goal, yet 16th in actual goals, their finishing papering over a thin shot diet. When the finishing left in the playoffs, there was nothing underneath it. The Wild outscored the Stars 14-4 at five-on-five across the six games.
The Neutral Zone and the Trade-Off
Another local Stars beat writer, David Castillo, broke down Dallas’ play in a tape study, backed by Corey Sznajder’s All Three Zones tracking (a hockey micro-stats site). He found that Dallas left too much space between its forwards and defenders, which let Minnesota build speed, enter cleanly, and dictate territory.
“The recurring theme here [is] that all series, there was too much space between the Dallas forwards and the Dallas defenders. The Wild had access to quick entries, forcing a lot of passive play.”
source – ‘Figuring out what happened to the stingy Dallas defense versus Minnesota’ – David Castillo – Stars Stack – 05-18-2026
Castillo’s read is that the Stars’ collapsing defensive-zone structure holds up against most teams but gets picked apart by a group that moves the puck patiently in the offensive zone. With Heiskanen and Esa Lindell on the ice, the top pair was outshot 34-48 and on for a 0-3 goal share.
Miro Heiskanen, Dallas Stars (Amy Irvin / The Hockey Writers)
That is the trade-off underneath Heiskanen’s comments, the one he doesn’t quite name. Gulutzan was hired to fix the defense, and he did. The season before, Dallas ranked 13th in the league in goals against, right around the middle of the NHL’s 32 teams. In his first season as the coach, the Stars climbed to second, meaning only one team in the entire league gave up fewer goals. That sturdiness appears to have come at a cost, though, as the even-strength offense slipped while the defense tightened. Both writers are careful to say the finishing slump wasn’t the coach’s doing. Though Gulutzan admitted the neutral zone was the issue, saying Minnesota was allowed to dictate too much of the series.
“I thought we allowed Minnesota to control a little bit too much of the play, and that’s an area that we’re going to try to nip up next year for sure, with a little bit of a system change.”
source – ‘[Almost] Everything We Learned from Dallas Stars End of Year Interviews: System Changes, Jamie Benn’s Decision, Jake Oettinger’s Urgency, Jason Robertson’s High Standards, and Injury Updates Galore’ – Robert Tiffin – Stars Thoughts – 05-04-2026
So when Heiskanen asks for a tighter defense and more offense at the same time, he isn’t contradicting himself. He’s describing the same two-part problem that Gulutzan laid out in May.
Both Castillo and Tiffin cover the Stars for D Magazine and run their own Substacks, Castillo’s Stars Stack and Tiffin’s Stars Thoughts, worth a subscription for even more in-depth Stars coverage that supports local Texas journalists.
Why Miro Heiskanen Still Believes
The confidence makes more sense once you count who was missing. Gulutzan said Dallas lost 380 man-games and called 112 points. A man-game is one player missing one game. Add up every game every injured player sat out over the season, and Dallas lost 380 of them. Roope Hintz missed the entire Minnesota series with a torn hamstring in two places. Tyler Seguin was out after ACL surgery. Nils Lundkvist took a skate blade to the face in Game 4 and missed the last two games. Heiskanen played the series with a torn oblique. Mikko Rantanen admitted he never recovered his pre-Olympic form.
The Stars are running most of that group back. They explored a trade for Zach Werenski that collapsed when he vetoed the move, then re-signed Jason Robertson to a one-year, $12 million deal, keeping the core intact. Robertson had led Dallas with five goals in six playoff games, most of the team’s five-on-five offense by himself. Heiskanen’s line about having all the tools was, in fact, his answer to a question about missing out on Werenski.
October won’t settle this. We will see whether Gulutzan’s promised neutral-zone change unlocks even-strength finishing without giving back the defense that carried the regular season, and whether a healthy top six holds up when the ice tightens in the spring. The Stars get their first look on Oct. 2 against the St. Louis Blues, but I think most Stars fans are waiting on what the playoffs bring in 2027.
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